Daphne Keller is the Director of Intermediary Liability at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. Her work focuses on platform regulation and Internet users' rights. She has published both academically and in popular press; testified and participated in legislative processes; and taught and lectured extensively. Her recent work focuses on legal protections for users’ free expression rights when state and private power intersect, particularly through platforms’ enforcement of Terms of Service or use of algorithmic ranking and recommendations. Until 2015 Daphne was Associate General Counsel for Google, where she had primary responsibility for the company’s search products. She worked on groundbreaking Intermediary Liability litigation and legislation around the world and counseled both overall product development and individual content takedown decisions.

This panel considered issues of national jurisdiction in relation to Internet platforms’ voluntary content removal policies. These policies, typically set forth in Community Guidelines (CGs) or similar documents, prohibit content based on the platforms’ own rules or values—regardless of whether the content violates any law.

The essay below serves as introduction to the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's Law, Borders, and Speech Conference Proceedings Volume. The conference brought together experts from around the world to discuss conflicting national laws governing online speech -- and how courts, Internet platforms, and public interest advocates should respond to increasing demands for these laws to be enforced on the global Internet.

Today, someone asked me about the Internet and human well-being over the next decade. The question was a healthy provocation to look at the big picture. I chose “more helped than harmed” from the very short list of radio-button responses. Here’s my elaboration:

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Lately, politicians and newssources have been repeating a persistent myth about, of all things, technology law. The myth concerns a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, generally known as Section 230 or CDA 230.

In recent years, lawmakers around the world have proposed a lot of new intermediary liability (IL) laws. Many have been miscalibrated – risking serious collateral damage without necessarily using the best means to advance lawmakers’ goals. That shouldn’t be a surprise. IL isn’t like tax law or farm subsidies. Lawmakers, particularly in the United States, haven’t thought much about IL in decades.

This essay closely examines the effect on free-expression rights when platforms such as Facebook or YouTube silence their users’ speech. The first part describes the often messy blend of government and private power behind many content removals, and discusses how the combination undermines users’ rights to challenge state action. The second part explores the legal minefield for users—or potentially, legislators—claiming a right to speak on major platforms.

On Tuesday, in a courtroom in Luxembourg, the Court of Justice of the European Union is to consider whether Google must enforce the “right to be forgotten” — which requires search engines to erase search results based on European law — everywhere in the world.

Policymakers increasingly ask Internet platforms like Facebook to “take responsibility” for material posted by their users. Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders seem willing to do so. That is in part a good development. Platforms are uniquely positioned to reduce harmful content online. But deputizing them to police users’ speech in the modern public square can also have serious unintended consequences. This piece reviews existing laws and current pressures to expand intermediaries’ liability for user-generated content.

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"Daphne Keller at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society said internet companies doing business in countries with laws restricting speech know they will be expected to comply with the rules. One common means of doing so without deleting lawful speech elsewhere is to offer country-specific versions of services, like YouTube Thailand, said Keller.

"The company can then honor national law on the version of the service that is targeted to, and primarily used in, that country," she said."

"Daphne Keller, an Internet law expert at Stanford Law School and former attorney at Google, said prior court decisions favor Yelp and she would be surprised if the California Supreme Court didn't reverse the ruling.

"“The place we all go to exercise our freedom of expression and to share opinions is a private platform run by a private company, and they don’t let us say every single thing that’s legal,” says Daphne Keller, director of intermediary liability at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and a former head lawyer for Google’s web search team. “They only let us say the things that their policies permit. There’s good business reasons for that for them, but it’s a strange impact for us as a society sharing speech.”"

"And its odds of winning are high, said Daphne Keller, director of intermediary liability at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, who said many companies have successfully used the CDA as a defense."

"When platforms are made responsible for determining what speech is illegal, those intermediaries tend to over-remove content, out of an abundance of caution, Daphne Keller, the director of intermediary liability at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and a former associate general counsel at Google, told BuzzFeed News. “They take down perfectly legal content out of concern that otherwise they themselves could get in trouble,” Keller said.

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This session will explore jurisdiction in an increasingly post-Westphalian paradigm. Ideas of territorial jurisdiction are being tested (and brought into question) in an increasingly connected online world.

What and whom should the Internet forget? Who should decide? Can search engines be trusted as the guardians and censors of the online world? How are individual interests best protected on the internet? How can we strike the balance between privacy and freedom of expression online? Has privacy won the draw, in the internet information age?

After a lengthy legislative process, the GDPR is finally ready. As the most significant overhaul of data privacy laws in Europe in twenty years, it will have a profound impact on Silicon Valley technology companies offering online services in Europe. The recently announced Privacy Shield will affect most US organisations that receive personal information from Europe.

Over 800 attendees registered at the State of the Net Conference (SOTN) in 2015. The conference provides unparalleled opportunities to network and engage on key Internet policy issues. SOTN is the largest Internet policy conference in the U.S. and the only one with over 50 percent Congressional staff and government policymakers in attendance.

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The question of what responsibility should lie with Internet platforms for the content they host that is posted by their users has been the subject of debate around in the world as politicians, regulators, and the broader public seek to navigate policy choices to combat harmful speech that have implications for freedom of expression, online harms, competition, and innovation.

Cybersecurity is increasingly a major concern of modern life, coloring everything from the way we vote to the way we drive to the way our health care records are stored. Yet online security is beset by threats from nation-states and terrorists and organized crime, and our favorite social media sites are drowning in conspiracy theories and disinformation. How do we reset the internet and reestablish control over our own information and digital society?

""Half the time it's, 'Oh no, Facebook didn't take something down, and we think that's terrible; they should have taken it down,' " says Daphne Keller, a law professor at Stanford University. "And the other half of the time is, 'Oh no! Facebook took something down and we wish they hadn't.' "

Full episode of "Bloomberg West." Guests include Daphne Keller, director of intermediary liability at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, David Kirkpatrick, Techonomy's chief executive officer, Radu Rusu, chief executive officer and co-founder of Fyusion, Crawford Del Prete, IDC's chief research officer, and Daniel Apai, assistant professor at The University of Arizona.